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Phantasmic Metareference The Pastiche ‘Operas’ in Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera David Francis Urrows Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera (London, 1986) presents an interesting case of metareference. A so-called megamusical, it is a popular mu- sical theatre piece in which opera itself is a kind of character, and which refers on many levels to opera, operatic conventions, and specific operatic musical styles. Departing from Gaston Leroux’s 1909–1910 novel, in which actual operas (nota- bly Gounod’s Faust) function as important plot devices, Lloyd Webber and his li- brettists created three pastiche ‘operas’, parts of which are heard and seen in the course of the musical. These fragments themselves play important intracomposi- tional roles in the plot. However, outside of the diegetic context of the musical’s story, they also possess extracompositional qualities which reference musical, historical, and dramatic events, as well as musical styles, repertoires, and even specific works. These metareferential aspects are amplified in the 2004 film ver- sion, where the cinema audience is able to observe not only the ‘operas’, but also the opera ‘audience’ within the production. Whatever one may think of Lloyd Webber’s music, these are provocative exemplars of what has been called ‘inter- musical system reference’. Here, in this case study, I propose a new category for evaluation, which I call ‘uncritical musical metareference’, or even ‘destructive homage’. I take my cue from Werner Wolf’s article “Metafiction and Metamu- sic: Exploring the Limits of Metareference”, in which he mentions that “in all kinds of vocal music, metareference is not much of a problem” with regard to the limits alluded to in his title: […] thanks to the support of verbal language [… s]ongs can use explicit metamu- sicality by thematicizing singing and music making, and metaoperas (such as Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, or Richard Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos) and metamusicals (such as The Phantom of the Opera) can comprise ex- tensive comments on, and presentations of, musical and operatic activities. (2007: 309) To this list one could add of course, and I might just mention Hans Pfitzner’s much-neglected Palestrina. But what arrested my attention was the mention of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1986 Phantom in such august company. Lloyd’s Webber’s musical is more than that: it now 260 David Francis Urrows belongs to the category of ‘megamusical’. Such megamusicals, ac- cording to Jessica Sternfeld in her recent study, usually originate in Europe and are distinguished from earlier “golden age” musicals by “a sung-through score with no spoken dialog, lavish and complicated sets, and an extremely emotional, larger-than-life plot” (2006: 9). Sternfeld traces the megamusical from Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ, Superstar (1971) through all of his other hits, including Cats (1981) and Phantom, to Aspects of Love (1989) and Sunset Boulevard (1993), as well as to an expanding, international genre no longer confined to Broadway or the West End, including Les Misérables (1980) and Miss Saigon (1989). But Phantom is distinguished from the others by its metareferential qualities. Wagner had no problems putting the Lieder of the Mastersingers into his opera: people sing songs in opera all the time. Pfitzner sum- moned an angelic choir to sing to Palestrina, composing his mass at the end of Act One of his opera – but such things happen in opera. A musical about opera, however, poses certain obvious practical and theoretical problems: how to get the ‘opera’ into the musical? Opera and the Opéra Garnier are such important figures – almost characters – in Gaston Leroux’s 1909–1910 novel1 that it is hard to think how with the limitations of Broadway theater orchestras, the musical abili- ties of the singers generally employed, and the generic and cultural expectations of musical audiences, an adapted musical about opera could be successful. Here it might be pertinent to briefly trace some of the more important adaptations of Leroux’s novel and their salient departures, concisions, and expansions of his story, which fed into a more general mythological and popular entity called ‘The Phantom of the Opera’, and upon which Lloyd Webber’s musical greatly depends to get around this stumbling block. It goes without saying that a novel about an ‘opera ghost’ must be as much about opera as about the supernatural. The more so since Erik the Phantom is only pretending to be a ghost, although he does in fact live a troglodyte existence below the Paris opera house. In the novel specific operas function as plot devices: they provide a journalistic verisimilitude, as one would expect from Leroux (1868–1927), who once worked as a court reporter. But on a deeper level the operas Leroux chose to link to his plot also have obvious reflexive roles to 1 Serialized in the magazine Le Gaulois between 23 September 1909 and 8 January 1910. Published (in French) in book form 1910; first English edition 1911. .

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